The Role Of Religion In 21st Century Public Schools

The fight over the role of religion in public schools is far from finished, and the last and final words have not been written. This collection of original essays reveals and updates the battlefield. Included are essays on school prayer, the evolution/intelligent design debate, public funding of religious groups on university campuses, religious themes in school-taught literature, and more. With diverse tones and points of view, these essays offer quality scholarship while revealing and honoring the heat these themes generate.

It isn’t just in recent arguments over the teaching of intelligent design or reciting the pledge of allegiance that religion and education have butted heads: since their beginnings nearly two centuries ago, public schools have been embroiled in heated controversies over religion’s place in the education system of a pluralistic nation. In this book, Benjamin Justice and Colin Macleod take up this rich and significant history of conflict with renewed clarity and astonishing breadth. Moving from the American Revolution to the present—from the common schools of the nineteenth century to the charter schools of the twenty-first—they offer one of the most comprehensive assessments of religion and education in America that has ever been published. From Bible readings and school prayer to teaching evolution and cultivating religious tolerance, Justice and Macleod consider the key issues and colorful characters that have shaped the way American schools have attempted to negotiate religious pluralism in a politically legitimate fashion. While schools and educational policies have not always advanced tolerance and understanding, Justice and Macleod point to the many efforts Americans have made to find a place for religion in public schools that both acknowledges the importance of faith to so many citizens and respects democratic ideals that insist upon a reasonable separation of church and state. Finally, they apply the lessons of history and political philosophy to an analysis of three critical areas of religious controversy in public education today: student-led religious observances in extracurricular activities, the tensions between freedom of expression and the need for inclusive environments, and the shift from democratic control of schools to loosely regulated charter and voucher programs. Altogether Justice and Macleod show how the interpretation of educational history through the lens of contemporary democratic theory offers both a richer understanding of past disputes and new ways of addressing contemporary challenges.

This book explores the possible role and impact of teachers' and students' faith in the English language classroom.

The diversity education literature, both nationally and internationally, is broad and diffuse. Consequently, there needs to be a systematic and logical way to organize and present the state of research for students and professionals. American citizens need to understand the dynamics of their increasingly diverse communities and institutions and the global world in which we live, work, and lead. With continually evolving information on diversity policies, practices, and programs, it is important to have one place where students, scholars, teachers, and policymakers can examine and explore research, policy, and practice issues and find answers to important questions about how diversity in U.S. education—enriched with theories, research and practices in other nations—are explained and communicated, and how they affect institutional change at both the K-12 and postsecondary levels. With about 700 signed entries with cross-references and recommended readings, the Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education (4 volumes, in both print and electronic formats) will present research and statistics, case studies, and best practices, policies, and programs at pre- and postsecondary levels. Diversity is a worldwide phenomenon, and while most of the entries in the Encyclopedia will focus on the United States, diversity issues and developments in nations around the world, including the United States, are intricately connected. Consequently, to illuminate the many aspects of diversity, this volume will contain entries from different nations in the world in order to illuminate the myriad aspects of diversity. From A-to-Z, this Encyclopedia will cover the full spectrum of diversity issues, including race, class, gender, religion, language, exceptionality, and the global dimensions of diversity as they relate to education. This four-volume reference work will be the definitive reference for diversity issues in education in the United States and the world.

This comparative philosophy of law book aims at formulating a new analytical approach to the Islamic legal tradition based on ‘juridical categories’, a concept that facilitates comprehension and understanding of juridical phenomena. Building upon legal comparativism and legal pluralism, this project intends to avoid bias caused by universalizing Western categories when analyzing foreign juridical notions, which inevitably results in the miscomprehension of non-Western ideas and institutions. Unlike existing literature, this project will not focus on substantive comparisons between normative contents, but on the ‘juridical perspectives’ that helped to shape the Islamic and Western legal orders.The book focuses on the most relevant juridical questions regarding the Islamic and Western legal perspectives, such as the different visions regarding juridical spatiality, the role of human reason and the relationship between law, man and the divinity. While contributing to legal philosophy, this work intends also to develop and define a new interdisciplinary approach, aiming to provide a starting point for novel analyses in research fields such as legal comparativism, legal pluralism, and constitutional law. Finally, by formulating a new interdisciplinary approach, it will provide a foundational discussion of a continuously evolving subject that will never be exhaustively explored. As such, it aims at broadening scholarly reflections on the relationship between the West and Islam, eventually placing these concepts within a suitably comprehensive and contextualized framework. "Published in cooperation with gLAWcal - Global Law Initiatives for Sustainable Development, Hornchurch, Essex, United Kingdom".

A comprehensive source that demonstrates how 21st century Christianity can interrelate with current educational trends and aspirations The Wiley Handbook of Christianity and Education provides a resource for students and scholars interested in the most important issues, trends, and developments in the relationship between Christianity and education. It offers a historical understanding of these two intertwined subjects with a view to creating a context for the myriad issues that characterize—and challenge—the relationship between Christianity and education today. Presented in three parts, the book starts with thought-provoking essays covering major issues in Christian education such as the movement away from God in American education; the Christian paradigm based on love and character vs. academic industrial models of American education; why religion is good for society, offenders, and prisons; the resurgence of vocational exploration and its integrative potential for higher education; and more. It then looks at Christianity and education around the globe—faith-based schooling in a pluralistic democracy; religious expectations in the Latino home; church-based and community-centered higher education; etc. The third part examines how humanity is determining the relationship between Christianity and education with chapters covering the use of Christian paradigm of living and learning; enrollment, student demographic, and capacity trends in Christian schools after the introduction of private schools; empirical studies on the perceptions of intellectual diversity at elite universities in the US; and more. Provides the breadth and depth of knowledge necessary to gain a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between Christianity and education and its place in contemporary society A long overdue assessment of the subject, one that takes into account the enormous changes in Christian education Presents a global consideration of the subject Examines Christian education across elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels The Wiley Handbook of Christianity and Education will be of great interest to Christian educators in the academic world, the teaching profession, the ministry, and the college and graduate level student body.

Education Reform proposes and defends an alternate paradigm of public education. It challenges “secular education” as a failed educational model and proposes an alternate model with far-reaching potential. It reveals how secular schools have insufficient resources to support the public’s educational interests while religious schools, within a plural public education system, have the superior capacity to nurture citizens with the moral, intellectual, and civic qualities of good citizenship. The fulcrum upon which Engelhardt’s argument rests is the recognition that beliefs and values of a religious nature not only provide motivating frameworks for individual life, but also, they naturally provide core sources of meaning, understanding, and motivation for education efforts. Whereas secular schools avoid these ideological resources, they potentially suffuse the curriculum, climate, and community of “religious” schools to increase their educational success. Thus, this book argues that the move to a plural public education system, in which families are free to choose either secular or publicly supportive “religious” schools, will advance the educational interests of America. This argument is developed in three parts. The first entails a multi-chapter analysis of education history to discern the relationship between religion and the public’s education goals. By tracing ways in which “religion” is a key resource for curricular meaning, parent buy-in, rational thought, individual morality, public unity, and academic inspiration, it correlates school secularization with many of our current education problems. Part two engages criticisms that may arise from this reform proposal - such as concerns regarding autonomy, deliberative skills, equity, and public cohesion. Part three illumines superior ways in which religious schools can address the public’s educational concerns. The book concludes by proposing ideas and principles to guide the development of an American plural public education system that allow the public to draw from the strengths of religious schools without secularizing them in the process or breaching church/state boundaries.